Why Digital Safety Matters, And What We’re Doing About It
This blog is co-authored by IPA’s Victoria Kiasyo Isika and Jackie Namubiru, and Alexandra De Filippo and Abigail Hatcher from sistemaFutura.
An illustration of a woman receiving negative messages on social media networks. © 2020 SurfsUp/Shutterstock.com
As our world rapidly transitions into digital spaces, technology has become essential for learning, working, accessing finance, participating in public life, connecting socially and even engaging in healthy exploration of relationships and intimacy. Unfortunately, these digital platforms often mirror and amplify the same gendered power dynamics that disadvantage women and girls offline. Digital spaces are frequently sites of harassment, abuse, and exclusion that silence women's voices, limit their participation, and impact their well-being.
This year's International Women's Day theme—"For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment"—reminds us to address barriers preventing women and girls’ full participation in all spheres, including digital environments. One such barrier is technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV).
TFGBV can be defined as "an act of violence perpetrated by one or more individuals that is committed, assisted, aggravated and amplified in part or fully by the use of information and communication technologies or digital media, against a person on the basis of their gender" (UNFPA, 2023). While this form of violence affects women and girls disproportionately worldwide, its extent and nature remain largely unknown in low- and middle-income countries. Without sufficient rigorous evidence and data, policymakers lack the insights needed to create effective preventative and responsive measures to protect women and girls in digital spaces.
Our Approach to Building Evidence
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is addressing the knowledge gap in this emerging area of interest in the Gender-Based Violence space by collaborating with sistemaFutura to develop an instrument for measuring different kinds of TFGBV tailored to the experiences of women in African settings. Our approach includes:
- Mapping Existing Measures: We began by conducting a thorough scan of existing surveys measuring various manifestations of TFGBV, from cyberviolence to technology-enabled intimate partner violence.
- Co-Creation Workshops: Building on the measurement scan, we will soon lead workshop sessions with women to understand their experiences with online and offline violence, ensuring our measurements reflect lived realities.
- Stakeholder Engagement: In parallel, we will involve government agencies, women's rights organizations, and NGOs to contribute to our contextualization of TFGBV and explore pathways for integrating our measures into government and organizational data systems, policy and programmatic decisions.
- Field Validation: The final survey instrument will undergo field testing before wider dissemination to inform future research and prevalence studies.
Our work aligns with the research priorities identified in the Sexual Violence Research Institute's (SVRI) shared research agenda on TFGBV, which highlights five priorities to address existing knowledge gaps and guide efforts to tackle this pressing issue: understanding TFGBV's nature, prevalence, and impact; developing prevention and response strategies; examining effects across different populations; and creating tools and methodologies to deepen our understanding of this issue.
Our work with sistemaFutura is anything but one-dimensional—addressing not only the development of a TFGBV measurement tool grounded in African women’s experiences to inform future prevalence studies, but also responding to other thematic priorities outlined in the SVRI research agenda. Starting with Uganda and Nigeria in the first half of 2025, we plan to gradually expand to additional countries within and beyond sub-Saharan Africa. This expansion will help build a more comprehensive understanding of TFGBV across diverse contexts.
Looking Ahead: Why Investing in Digital Safety Can’t Wait
As we reflect on 30 years of progress since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the blurred lines between offline and online gender-based violence make it more urgent than ever to create safe digital environments "For ALL Women and Girls." We call on funders, decision-makers, researchers, and other partners to invest in evidence-driven solutions, ensuring digital platforms are safe, accessible and empowering for women and girls, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.